Single sign-on

Testing for the single sign-on project is finally drawing to a close, with just one database left to resolve. We would like to thank the students and staff that took part in the testing, and are really appreciative of all the positive feedack we recieved.

What is single sign on?

Single sign-on is a way of accessing Library resources using your Bath Spa username/password. In the past students have set-up seperate ‘Athens’ accounts in order to access our resources from home. This would often become a barrier as passwords were very easily forgotten.

In September 2009 the University began testing a product called OpenAthens LA 2.0, which allows students and staff to access Library resources in the same way they would access Minerva or email.

Our sucess in testing this software has enabled the creating company (Eduserv) to use us a case study, presenting our success to potential customers.

In early April we plan to remove all Athens access to our resources, before enabling the single sign-on service across almost our entire range of resources. This may have some implications for Refworks users, for which the following blog post will provide some vital information.

If there are any questions please contact Matt Durant (m.durant@bathspa.ac.uk) or post comments below.

Refworks and single sign-on

Athens access to Refworks will shortly be removed, allowing users to log-in with a Bath Spa username/password.

However when you log-in to the service with your new username and password for the first time, your references will not be migrated across. To make sure this happens, you will have to do it manually:

Image Management System

Library and Information services has now purchased a new image management system from Extensis. The product is called Portfolio, which in colloboration with another Extensis product called Netpublish allows us to catalogue thousands of copyright cleared images, before making them available via an internal website. The system has been made available for hosting digitised slides at Sion Hill, but departments will be later offered the opportunity to store and maintain their own image assets through the system.

The system will be branded and promoted to Art students and staff throughout September, giving users the opportunity to search and download from the collection anywhere on campus via an interface comparible to Google Images.

For more information please contact:

Nigel Paine, Image Collection Librarian n.paine@bathspa.ac.uk

Matt Durant, Information Manager (Digital Resources) m.durant@bathspa.ac.uk

Refworks

Bath Spa have bought a three year licence for Refworks, an online research management, writing and collaboration tool. Refworks allows students and staff to build a collection of references for any writing based projects or assignments, which can be exported at any point into a bibliography.

Refworks also has some superb features including:

• Direct bibliographic importing from many of our electronic databases at Bath Spa
• Library catalogue integration, allowing our books to be instantly imported into your bibliographies
• RefGrab-It: Captures bibliographic information from web pages, allowing you the option to import data directly into your RefWorks account
• Write-N-Cite: a piece of software which allows you to instantly insert your references directly into your document as you are writing it, in almost any format you choose. The software also automatically creates a bibliography at the end of your document

Refworks can be accessed by visiting their website, www.refworks.com, clicking on ‘Login’, before choosing Athens as your method for logging in. If you do not have an Athens account, please visit either of the libraries at Newton Park or Sion Hill.

Refworks quick start guide (PDF)

Refworks basic user guide (PDF)

Refworks advanced users guide (PDF)

Refworks in 15 minutes (Powerpoint)

If you would like to know more about Refworks please email libenq@bathspa.ac.uk.